


The Field

by anewkindofthrill



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Canon Compliant, M/M, Paths, Spoilers, post chapter 119, world building
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-21
Updated: 2019-07-21
Packaged: 2020-07-09 22:50:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,784
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19895650
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anewkindofthrill/pseuds/anewkindofthrill
Summary: Levi waits on their Path until Eren comes to join him.





	The Field

**Author's Note:**

> If this makes any sense, it only will if you've read chapter 119. Heavy manga spoilers ahead.

When Levi woke up, half of his face was covered in dirt. 

He immediately sat up, vaguely wondering where all the pain went. Some of the dirt fell off his face, but some of it stayed. He raised one hand -- the one he wouldn’t ever be able to use against Titans again -- to wipe his eye clean, but a small voice stopped him. 

“Don’t do it. It’s not fully healed yet. Please give me your hand, too, my lord.” 

Levi turned around and saw a girl. She looked a bit like Historia -- and a bit like Eren, too. 

In Levi’s mind, Historia and Eren had always been somewhat alike. 

“Who are you?” He asked the child. He saw that her hands were full of the same dirt that had been covering his face moments ago. “And what are you doing?” 

“Making you anew.” Levi noticed how she didn’t answer his first question, but that was when he started to take in his surroundings. Her identity became less of a priotity. 

He was sitting in what he could only describe as the landscape before the ocean, only without the water.  _ Desert _ , a voice in his mind that sounded a lot like Armin supplied. But he wasn’t sitting on sand; his intact hand grabbed some of the dirt and let it fall between his fingers. It was both dry and wet, both fine and rough. Sometimes it was cold, then it was hot. 

It felt a lot like Titan flesh to Levi, right before it vanished. 

He saw the material glisten as it fell down back to the ground. The stars in the sky provided eery moving lights, as if they were flowing up a river. Levi looked up and even though his nature was pragmatic to the core, he allowed himself a second of reverence. They were beautiful.

They looked a lot like the lights dancing in that pair of eyes to Levi, green, silver, gold. 

“Please lie back down, my Lord of the Field, so I can make you whole again from the flesh of your flesh.” 

The girl looked subservient, but there was something commanding in her tone. It made the hairs on Levi’s back stand up in defiance, and so he stood as well. 

He finally cleaned the dirt away from his eye and opened it. He could see alright, but where once his eyebrow and his cheeckbone lay intact and sharp as ever, there was a deep slash going through them. 

“I don’t want this stuff in me, thanks.” He declined. 

“But you are made of it.” 

The girl was still sitting in the soil, looking up at Levi. “You are the Lord of it. The Lord of the Field,  _ Ackermann _ . You send them here for me so I can make them back into soil.”

Levi  _ tsk _ ed. “I don’t kill them so you can have some dirt to play around with and put into others’ open wounds. That’s fucking disgusting. I kill them so we can be free.” 

The girl shrugged. “You are the Lord of the Field and I am here to make you whole for Him.” 

“He can make me whole by himself alright, brat. I ask you for the last time: Who are you?” 

There was a profound sadness in the girl’s face as she got up and patted down her dirty skirt. Then she looked up at the sky and spoke. 

“I am the Titan.” 

  
  


That meant he had to wait. That was alright to Levi -- he could lose himself, just lying down and staring at the stars that were flowing above his head. They always took the same directions, as if they were following Paths that were set in stone. 

Levi found it beautiful, but with every moment he observed (there was no concept of time, not here), he grew scared. 

The Paths were too rigid. Nothing ever left its destined way through the sky. Didn’t that mean nothing ever changed? 

Everything repeated itself over and over again? 

After a while he let the girl make him new fingers, but she still wasn’t allowed to touch his face. There was no chance to look at his face on the Field; he never got thirsty, so there wasn’t water to show his reflection. 

“It’s healing up on its own nicely, my darling,” his mother said as he lay there, his head in her lap. Kuchel was stroking through his dark hair, holding his face with an amount of affection Levi had only ever received from Him. “It is going to scar though if you don’t let her heal you properly.” 

“I don’t care, mother. I’d rather wear the scar.” 

Kenny sighed and rolled his eyes. “As if it matters. He won’t get here anyway. At least not alive. Also stop pampering the boy, sister.” 

“I think he will,” the tall blond man, who had been with them ever since Levi realized where he was, and who somehow didn’t look like Mikasa at all, said. “I knew the boy from when he was very young. Fierce little thing. When he wanted something he fought until he got it.” 

“He will.” Levi didn’t feel any doubt. 

“He shouldn’t,” the Titan said. She always stayed close to the Ackermanns, but a bit detached, her clear eyes looking at something none of the Lords and Ladies of this realm could see. “His task is to spread the Titans all over the world, to bring more soil to make life of.” 

“You can’t decide on what’s his task is,” Levi said, still looking up  _ up up _ at the sky, green eyes that burned with fire and rage. His mother didn’t stop fussing over him, smiling down lovingly onto her Lord son, all grown up. “He isn’t yours.” 

The girl looked at him sadly. “Do you think he’s yours, my lord?” 

“Oh, he’s his very own kind of monster.” 

iii.

“Did you really have to go and make that kid  _ blow your head off?! _ ” Levi kicked Eren’s side as he finally woke up. 

Levi’s silhouette against the sky full of stars was the single most beautiful thing Eren had ever seen. 

“You don’t know her, that would’ve been a thing she’d have pulled off even without my interference. She’s a fierce one.” For the first time in what felt like ages, Eren let his mask fall down and smiled at Levi, almost cheekily. “Hi Captain. I’m here to report for duty.” 

The feel of Levi’s boot against his skin was familiar as the Captain nudged his side. Eren stirred but Levi’s hands pinned him down immediately. 

“Don’t move or you will literally lose your head, you idiot. It’s gonna take a while, magical girl nurse says.” 

The Titan looked at them solemnly. “You shouldn’t be here, Hunter. It is not your part.” 

Eren grinned. “It is now. I decided so.”

He looked up at the sky; a trickle of light from the big river of stars seemed to branch out. It almost looked as if it took a whole different direction. 

“This hasn’t been there before you came, brat.” Levi looked at Eren as he sat down beside him, and for a second steel-grey eyes were so full of fondness, Eren had to avert his eyes. 

“What does it mean?” Eren asked. 

The girl turned her back towards them.

“It means you’ve created a new Path, I think” Levi answered. “I don’t get everything that’s happening here, but…” Levi took a fist full of soil and started molding a small human-like shape out of it. Eren, who could only move his eyes but not his head, peered at it. It reminded him a lot of the shape Levi drew onto the blackboard all this time ago. It made him smile. 

Suddenly the shape left Levi’s hands -- it walked on his own, grew, became something human-like. It was a woman, a woman with Levi’s face. She looked at the two of them, smiling, and Levi smiled back, before the woman waved her hand and vanished into thin air. 

The girl shuddered. 

“I think we can change things, Eren. I can change things here on the Field… and you can change the Paths in the sky.” Levi looked down at Eren, pragmatic as ever. 

“You should not,” the Titan whispered. “You are the Hunter, you hunt the others and make them into Titan, into soil. I gave you your brother back, he wants to burn down all soil, but you don’t, it’s your task to use your brother to bring us more.” 

Eren slowly turned his head left and right. It felt good to him, so he sat up, not without Levi rolling his eyes and holding out his hands in case of Eren’s head falling off his shoulders. 

It didn’t. 

Eren sat close next to Levi, who immediately seemed to relax. 

“And what if I neither want to bring more Titans nor make the root of them extinct?” Eren asked. 

Levi took Eren’s hand. Their fingers intertwined in the soil. 

The girl looked at them, confused. “What else is there to do?” 

Eren looked at Levi, determined, and back at the Titan. 

“We could just learn to live with the monster inside us. We could learn to be ourselves without ever becoming Titans again. Be Eldians, not Titans.” 

Fear crept into the girls expression. Levi grabbed the soil with his free hand and spoke. 

“I hate dirt. But dirt comes with life; every human dirties the world around them. So I take care of it, I clean it up. I take responsibility over the ones of us that don’t adhere to our rules, and send them here. But the rest,” he grabbed Eren’s hand tightly, “the rest of us shall live in freedom.” 

“But I make them into what they are!” The Titan suddenly sprang up and screamed, becoming something different. She grew and grew, her proportions distorted, she became what she truly was. The curse of their people.

“Eren,” Levi said calmly as both of them got up, “remember what you told me the first time we talked? What your goal was?” He bent down to pull two sets of 3D maneuver gears out of the soil, creating them so they would fit the two of them. 

Eren grinned, his face unhinged. “I will kill all the Titans.” He put on his gear immediately, as did Levi. 

“Not bad.” 

It didn’t matter that there was nothing for their wires to grab on. In this world, Eren and Levi could do whatever they wanted. 

The Titan screamed. 

Eren and Levi launched at it with their swords and their hearts, illuminated in new light against the darkness of the Field, in this new Path. 

**Author's Note:**

> I still have no idea or concrete theory on what Paths are so I build my own world of it. Can't wait for 120, pretty sure it won't look like that tho :D I do miss Levi / Ereri interactions.
> 
> "Acker" is German for "field". "Ackerbau" means agriculture. "Jäger" means "hunter". My German ass will always write them as Ackermann ("Mann" = man) and Jäger, everything else is confusing to me :D 
> 
> Tell me your thoughts on all this fantasy stuff Isayama is building his world with!! I find it so intriguing. And I just love comments.


End file.
